This is a HELP Section for our Sponsors. The purpose is to provide a variety of topics to improve your website, your presence on the internet and to take advantage of all the different areas of LAMP.
We will try to put together 'tips' and additional information on any topic that might be beneficial to you. We have numerous areas that we want to try. It would help it you would let us know, what is helpful and what isn't... Here is our starting material:
1. Selling your items
2. Utilizing the areas on LAMP
3. Special IM
4. Upcoming Shows
5. Your Website and sources to help
6. The internet and improving your status
Selling Your Items
Because of the cost of the auctions, most dealers can't afford to put their entire inventory up for auction. Too much work AND the cost of all of the unsold material would probably cost more than the profit you made on the SOLD material. Online auctions nickel and dime you to death.... and have been the ruin of many small dealers.
So most dealers don't have a choice but to ONLY put their better material up for auction to increase the percent of sales and lower the percent of items that you pay listing fees for but DON'T sell.
After doing that for a while.... WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR SLOWER SELLING MATERIAL. Well, it slowly gets pushed back and piles up more and more.. So consequently, the money that you have tied up in the slower selling material, continues to mount up as well... So your profit is slowly shifted into piles of slower selling items.
At LAMP, we wanted to present the reverse. A place where you can put your entire inventory without paying any additional money.... Not EVERYONE wants just the hottest selling items. We believe that there are many collectors out there looking for odd and unusual pieces. BUT.....
You can't SELL IT.... if they don't know that you HAVE IT.... Let your slower material have a chance at selling instead of just tying up your money.
WELL.. WE HAVE SOMETHING TO HELP YOU!!!!
We
have just finished our Video Tutorials on HOW TO LIST YOUR POSTERS IN THE
ARCHIVE.
We hope this will help you see how easy it is to control your inventory. Each tutorial is about 5 minutes long... but PLEASE be patient in the downloading. It has been taking about 3-4 minutes to download the video.. We are testing this out for several areas, so I would love to know what you think about it..
Listing your posters with an existing image - video tutorial
Listing you posters without an image. - video tutorial
The idea was to make sure that you load your inventory, either with the images or just below in the "Posters and Stills Not Pictured" section to get more exposure.
We are working on a new tutorial section. Loading is taking too long, but when I try to speed up the loading, I'm losing too much resolution and it becomes hard to read. I'm will continue to try to find a better program to work on this area.
Doing Research
You hear us promoting all of the research areas for Members..... Yes we are trying to create new research information in a wide variety of areas.... REMEMBER... as a Sponsor, you have access to ALL of the research areas. The more we can compile and do research, the more you have that research for your personal use. So.... check out all of the new areas.. Your log in and password lets you in all of the closed areas.
The best place to keep up with what is being added is to check on our log 'Advanced Research Log' every once in a while. This log let's you keep up with all areas and what's coming.
If you have NOT looked around LAMP in a while, it might be better to schedule a walk through with me. We do classes and walk through all the time to show new sections, easier ways to find the research, etc. So, please, let me know and I'll be glad to show you.
Something for you to keep in mind... The more collectors that we get on LAMP to do this research, the more exposure you will be getting with these new collectors and the better chance for you to make more sales.
For New Online Dealers
Your Website and Sources to Help
If you are maintaining your own website, then you know that massive amount of time and effort that can go into trying to make it presentable, creative AND get people to come on your site... THEN you want them to buy something....
There are a variety of ways to approach this.
1. You can go the way of the free site... such as Yahoo, my space, etc.. We really don't recommend this.. To make them free, they put advertising on the pages. Their clients pay them for the advertising so in essence, THEY are paying for your site and you have no control over what advertising is placed there. This immediately gives an unprofessional look and many people are very leary because it portrays that there has been no commitment or effort by the seller in making a retail site. These are great for blogs, fan sites and anything non-professional.
2. You can go the way of the pre-set site where you choose from a batch of templates. These look fancier and are fairly easy to set up and get started. There are places like Yahoo that has templated shops that you can set up.. This is a LOT better look than a free site AND you can have shopping cart and several other programs that help you with a quick and easy set-up. The downfall of these sites is that you are limited to the templates that they have, they are more expensive (usually about $40 a month), you are usually limited to about 50 meg of space and a limited bandwidth, and you are forced to advertise their sites by a variety of ways.. especially broadcasting their URL every time you want someone to come to your site.
3. You can set up your own site. This can sound scary... but with a little effort, it's not hard. Luckily the templates weren't available when we started so we didn't have the option. I'm glad I was forced to learn the ins and outs. To go this route, you first need space. We were stung by a small provider when we first started and lost all of our content that we had worked hard to get online, so we did a massive search to find a good source that was reliable. The best that we found was a site called Readyhosting.com. (and no, we do not get a commission from them). They are one of the largest providers for small businesses and have thousands of accounts. They give 250 meg of space (which is larger than most people will EVER use) for $99 a YEAR. This includes all the basics that you need plus a lot more.. like unlimited email addresses with YOUR website name. When you email anyone, you are advertising YOUR site instead of some other companies.. They also give easy instructions in connecting your space to the internet so you can upload the pages that you want.
You will also need your website name. Most places like Register.com charge you $35 a year for the name. We suggest GoDaddy.com. They charge $8.95 per year per name.. The only thing is they will offer you every type of additional website stuff known to man. You don't need the majority of this stuff, but some of it is very useful. (If you don't have a site name and go to Readyhosting, you can get a name through them and THEY will pay for your name and include it in the $99 per year)
For writing your site, there are several interfaces such as Front Page for Internet Explorer users that is fairly easy to learn that will help you make your pages. Front Page is microsoft and normally comes on your Windows PCs. For a little better variety of this, Microsoft Business combines all the business programs that you need; Word for documents, Front Page for page layout, Outlook for email handling, Powerpoint for images, Excel for spreadsheets, Access for databases and Office Tools for everything else that you want.
We were fortunate enough that my son-in-law is a programmer and showed us Dreamweaver when we started... it makes setting up pages, tables, and links extremely simple. This is great when you are planning to put a LOT of material online. There is a program with it called Fireworks to handle images that is excellent. We handle a LARGE amount of images so we wanted a bigger program for them. Photo Shop is great but we use Paint Shop.
Other Sources
A fun place to go to is a place called FlamingText.com - They handle all types of fonts. You can make banners, buttons,